Database system for clinical and computer assisted diagnosis of dermoscopy images

Abstract

Dermoscopy is a non-invasive diagnosis technique for in vivo observation of pigmented skin lesions used in dermatology. There is currently a great interest in the development of computer assisted diagnosis systems, given their great potential to this area of medicine. The standard approach in automatic dermoscopic image analysis can be divided in three stages: image segmentation, feature extraction/selection and lesion classification. In order to validate the algorithms developed for each stage, a great number of reliable images and clinical diagnosis are required. This paper presents a software tool to collect and organize dermoscopic data from hospital databases. It is suitable for clinical daily routine and simultaneously has a data structure to support the development and validation of algorithms created by the researchers to construct the computer assisted diagnosis system. This tool is composed by a database with three related but independent modules: Clinical Module, Processing Module and Statistical Module.